7 social media analytics tools every marketer should try

To know whether your social media marketing efforts are paying off, you need to analyze your current performance

The idea behind social media analytics, while being quite new, rests on an age-old principle — you need to understand where you are to know where you are going. To paraphrase this, to know whether your social media marketing efforts are paying off, you need to analyze your current performance.

Social media platforms understand the importance of analytics, that’s why they all provide users with some form of insight. Considering how many options platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer for data analysis, trying to determine which metrics are actually valuable can be quite disorienting.

Moreover, beyond your own data, there is so much more to pay attention to and derive valuable lessons from. You can identify content trends, learn more about your target audience behaviour, your competitors’ strategy, ect. These are not the kind of analytics that you can find in Facebook’s native insights, you will need a social listening tool to collect and analyze social media data from various sources.

In this article, you will find tools that either help you make sense of your own social media data or use publicly accessible data to inform your marketing decisions (or both).

1. Awario

Awario is a social listening tool that analyzes publicly available online data based on the keywords you choose to put in. This makes the tool extremely versatile: it provides you with valuable insights on your brand, your audience, your competitors, influencers in your industry, ect.

Awario gathers social data from all the major social media platforms as well as the web. The statistics you’re able to get from the tool include:

The number of mentions: How many times your keyword(s) was/were mentioned on social media and the web.

The reach of your keyword: How many people saw your keyword(s).

The number of mentions by platform: Which part of the Internet generates the most mentions containing your keyword(s).

The number of mentions by location and language: Where people are discussing your keyword(s) the most.

The sentiment behind social mentions: How people feel when they talk about your keyword(s).

The key themes around your keyword(s): Which phrases are used the most with your keywords.

It’s also able to analyze the authors who mention your keywords and evaluate their influence and activity.

You dig social media data by creating an alert to monitor your keyword or keyword combinations. You can compare up to three alerts in the Alert Comparison tab, which, in addition to all the analytics mentioned above, will tell you the share of voice between the alerts. So, for example, if you have an alert monitoring your brand name and another alert for your competitor’s brand name, it will tell which one has the bigger share of voice, i.e., which one is more discussed on social media.

All this data can be exported in CSV files, or in PDF whitelabel reports.

2. Sotrender

Sotrender is the tool that helps you get the most out of your own social media statistics. It combines metrics from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube insights on one dashboard allowing for easy access and analysis. It shows you where your followers are most active, what content performs best, and how your fans are engaging with it. Based on these numbers, Sotrender will recommend some actions that you could take to improve your social media performance.

What’s great about this tool is that you’re able to track the performance of your competitors as well. You can analyze the content they post, their audience, growth rates, and so on, to see how you stack up against them.

The other important part of social media analytics is reporting. Reports help you keep your team and management up to date and can persuade your clients to invest in certain strategies. Sotrender provides users with scheduled automated reports but you can also customize reports for specific occasions.

If you need a platform to collect all your analytics in one place and present them in nice-looking reports, Sotrender is a great choice.

3. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is another social listening tool, however, it analyzes social listening data for different purposes. First and foremost, it leverages social media analytics to inform your content strategy (both web content and social media content).

The tool analyzes content shares to identify the hottest topics, emerging trends, thought leaders, and the most popular content types. It finds the hottest content by topic, author, or domain within a matter of seconds. Buzzsumo also shows the share activity across all the major social networks including, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

You can also search the posts by type, for example, only look for infographics or interviews. You can set Buzzsumo to alert you any time someone publishes an article with your keyword, your competitor has a breakout post, or when a specific author posts an article.

Buzzsumo also offers powerful influencer analytics features. It identifies influencers in your topic area and shows what content they prefer, the topics they talk about and the domains they mention most often.

You can also see who shares the content from your competitors’ domains and compare your content performance on social media with your competitors’ performance.

Buzzsumo is the best match for the brands that put a heavy weight on their content marketing strategy.

4. Crowdbabble

Crowdbabble is a platform that gives you access to detailed analytics of your social media accounts across a variety of platforms. It gets data from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Snapchat.

It collects all the necessary metrics in one place so you can check out your Facebook performance and your Snapchat performance without having to open separate apps. You can also download any chart generated by Crowdbabble with one click. You'll definitely want to download it too as the tool visualizes your social media data to make it easy to understand and create a cohesive narrative. It offers over 100 different reports.

Besides your social media profiles, Crowdbabble can analyze your branded hashtag and tell you how many people mention it in a minute, how many users are engaging with it and the top posts that mention the hashtag.

5. Sprout Social

Technically, Sprout Social is not an analytics tool, it’s a social media management tool, meaning that it combines scheduling, profile analytics, and social listening features.

You can see individual statistics such as reach, clicks and impressions for each post right from the platform in the Sent Messages report. There are also separate dashboards for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook analytics where you can see your profile analytics and benchmark your account against competitors. You’re also able to see cross-channel reports, which combine the data from all your social media accounts.

Sprout Social also does social listening for brand analysis, market research, and customer support. It allows you to identify social media trends, pin down the key topics around your brand, and give a timely response to criticism on social media.

Since Sprout Social is an agency-focused tool, it also allows you to see analytics that deal with your teamwork, for example, how many direct messages a certain team member answered.

All this data can be exported as raw CVS files or presentation-ready PDF reports.

The tool will be perfect for those who want to have all their social media activity in one place and are ready to pay for it. Since you’re paying per user, the overall cost can be quite high, but ultimately, it’s worth it.

6. Rival IQ

Rival IQ is another social media platform that pulls data from your social media accounts and collects social listening data. As you can guess from the name, the tool puts emphasis on competitor analysis, but there are many more use cases for it.

Rival IQ shows you the native statistics from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, and analyzes social listening data from Twitter and Instagram. What makes it stand out is the fact that it doesn’t just pull data from your profile, it also analyses your Facebook and Instagram ads data to make sure you’re spending the advertising budget efficiently.

As for competitor analysis, you have a wide variety of tools to choose from here. You can see how your performance compares to your competitors’ by benchmarking your social media accounts against theirs. Rival IQ will show you which Facebook posts your competitor boosted so you will be able to see what updates they give special priority to. Moreover, you will get alerted every time their post performs unusually well either by email or in the app.

The tool allows integration with Google Analytics, so you get even more insights to inform your marketing decisions.

It will be the best fit for brands that want to engage in a comprehensive competitor analysis strategy.

7. Falcon.io

Falcon.io is the powerhouse of social media marketing. The platform gives you tools to design and approve content calendar, find new content, monitor chosen keywords, evaluate your performance and more.

The tool gathers and analyses social listening data to guide your content strategy and help you define your target audience. In the Audience dashboard, you can build a specific segment you want to target based on various sets of demographics and social media behaviour data.

Falcon.io aims to make the insights it discovers actually actionable. It recommends you the best times to post and the best type of content to share. In addition to that, it integrates with major digital marketing platforms such as Hubspot, so you’re able to act on the analytics provided by the tool.

The tool allows you to build extensive customizable reports and send them out to stakeholders and colleagues right from the platform.

This is the best choice for marketers who want to deep-dive into audience and market analytics.

Final thoughts

Here you go: seven tools that set out to empower you with data analytics, but all go about it in their own way. Whether you’re looking for an affordable way to do market research or want to take up competitor analysis — there will be something on the market for you. So don’t be afraid to try out new tools, especially, considering that almost all of them offer free trial!

Anna Bredava is a Social Media Marketing Specialist at Awario. She writes about social media trends, small business marketing, and tools that help anyone interested in marketing.

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